MoMo Demo Experience

Experience with doing the MoMo Demo on monday could described best as a little lack luster. It is little hard to say that for an event that you try to coordinate but that is how I would best describe it. But I think the best part of doing an open/informal conference is that you have room to experiment new things and make it better every time 🙂 and this was the first time we were introducing demos with regular talks.

The little bit of my disappointment stems from the lack of response from the audience during my demo after all that was my take away from doing a demo. The tough time that I had with the audience was that I was not able to engage most of them in the discussion as they had already moved out for snack time.

Any consumer technology product  can have  possibly two response only-  either users love it  or they hate it.  Any other intermediate response means that you are dead meat already.  Kathy sierra has very articulately this very clearly in her post long ago.

Now having obtained rave reviews from those who are alpha testing ‘wwigo’ an indifference from the audience came as a serious bummer to me.  What was a little comforting though was when I chatting with someone after the demo and he told me that I should not worry about it too much it because I was competing for attention with food ( most of the group had already proceeded to munching their snacks at the snack table  at the back of the room) which even the best of the speakers in the world  can’t compete well 🙂
It was little trying and hard for me to wear both the hat of  a presenter and as well a s a coordinator of the event. Couple of things that I wanted to articulate to the audience as a coordinator of the event would have been mistaken as an answer from the presenter.

For example  the demo was not meant for analyzing whether the product demo’ed is worthy of any investment. It was more for sharing a cool idea/concept, what it could be used for etc and feedback on what could be done to make it better. Rather than dicussing the coolness or usefulness of  the Inactiv service or how it could be made better the audience went in tirade against on how much money Inactiv is bleeding 🙁
Lessons that I learned as presenter

• Never announce what the demo is about even if people pester you to do so, the surprise/intrigue element goes away. I had at the request from a member mentioned what the demo was going to be about.
• Never schedule your demo just before/after lunch or snacks time.

Lessons as an organizer

• Repeat this to yourself – unstructuredness is good but unorganized may not be.
• ALWAYS Check beforehand the presentation room for accoustics and lighting.

After recieving good and improvement feedback from the members to have a little bit of more direction & focus we will be trying to make the next time’s MoMo a little bit more structured during the discussion.